Before I wrote Blood on the Veld, I knew that writing a thriller about wildlife trafficking would involve a considerable amount of research. What I didn't fully appreciate was how much time I'd spend figuring out how to turn that research into a story. There are facts to investigate, places to visit, people to interview, characters to develop, and plots to untangle. Then, eventually, you have to sit down and write the thing.

How a simple writing exercise led me into the disturbing world of wildlife trafficking and inspired an entirely new crime thriller series. My inspiration for Blood on the Veld came from making a list of things I hate. Not exactly romantic, I know, but it worked. At the time, I was living in a small city north of London and working as a paraplanner. My husband, Gareth, and I had moved south from Edinburgh after he decided to work for a tech start-up.

A 2013 report by Economists at Large examined the question of how much trophy hunting really contributes to African communities. The report found that as little as 3% was shared with local communities, and this money was first placed in the hands of potentially corrupt middlemen, who may not even pass it on at all. The communities looked to photographic tourism for funding instead.

It is easy to focus conservation conversations on rangers, reserves, and animal populations. Those are the visible parts of the work. But political decisions matter just as much. Governments decide whether wildlife laws are strong or weak. Courts determine whether penalties are meaningful. Law enforcement agencies decide whether cases are investigated and prosecuted. Public officials determine whether corruption is tolerated or challenged. Without that institutional support,

Wildlife conservation is often presented as a simple conflict between animals and the people threatening them. In reality, the picture is far more complicated. In countries like Malawi, many rural communities live close to protected areas and depend directly on the land for food and income. That means conservation cannot succeed by focusing only on animals. It also has to address the practical realities of the people living beside them. An elephant may be majestic to a touris

Wildlife conservation stories are often dominated by loss. We hear about shrinking habitats, declining populations, poaching, trafficking, and species edging closer to extinction. Those stories matter, but they can also create the impression that wildlife decline is inevitable. Malawi offers a different kind of story. This small, landlocked country in southeastern Africa has spent decades rebuilding wildlife populations that were once devastated by poaching, political instabi

Elephants don’t recognize national borders, but the laws protecting them often stop at the edge of a map. Kenya’s super tuskers reveal why wildlife conservation must follow the animal across borders.

Most writers will tell you they conduct this much research, arms stretched wide, to use this much information, fingers held an inch apart, in the finished book. By the time I completed Blood on the Veld, I had accumulated hundreds of pages about wildlife trafficking, poaching, conservation policy, human-animal conflict, and the economics behind it all. Most of it never appeared in the novel. But many of the stories were too interesting to leave buried in a research file. So I